The Only Thing Trump's Testing is Our Patience

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody... It's been going on for a long time...and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on...and all this information that’s being released...some terrible things happened..." "President" Donald Trump, 5/11/20

With a big sign behind him that looked like something out of Oceania's MiniTru in 1984 and a table full of paraphernalia supposedly full of COVID-19 goodies (denied to many health care facilities to this day) that looked like something out of QVC, "President" Trump yesterday gave the diamond-encrusted platinum standard of what not to do at a press conference during the deadliest pandemic in 102 years.

    To date, over 80,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and those are just the ones whose causes of death we know. Only 2% of the US population had been tested for coronavirus (presumably because, as Trump himself said last week, testing "makes us look bad." It's hard to see how not testing makes us look better.)

     And to hear Captain COVID yesterday, we lead the world in testing (The sign said so.). This is wrong. In the time it took Trump to essentially condemn 80,000 Americans to a lingering painful death to coronavirus, South Korea, which immediately led the world in testing and social distancing, lost just over 250 of their people. As early as last winter, South Korea had set up drive-thru testing centers in which people were given results by text message within hours.

    The closest we've come to doing that was in supposedly partnering with private corporations like CVS that resulted in just five testing sites whose locations were kept secret and were for first responders only. So why aren't we testing more of our people and why haven't the testing protocols budged an inch since last winter (You still have to present symptoms before you can get a test while Trump and Pence are tested literally every day)? Well, see above. ("bad, makes us look.")

    It's long past the time when we should've stopped looking to the White House for any serious guidance and even more serious proactive measures from this self-interested White House that's plainly looking no further than the November 3rd election. Trump is not suddenly going to be hit with a clarifying dose of sanity, he's not going to start suddenly caring about people other than himself and the respirators, masks, ventilators, PPE and tests aren't going to start magically flowing forth from the national stockpile so that all hospitals and clinics are finally going to get everything they need.

     Trump is too busy shooting people on 5th Avenue and Main Street and trying to keep the coronavirus diagnoses low. The death toll can skyrocket, and has, for all he cares, but as long as the positive tests numbers remains low, that's all that matters to him. After all, as he said yesterday in his Rose Garden presser, people die of other things, too! Like, like, suicide and other stuff. Yeah, but not at the clip of 2500-3000 a day. 

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Presser That Wasn't Batshit Insane

In a, typically, suppressed report from his own shitshow of a coronavirus task force, it was revealed in a study obtained by NBC News that coronavirus hotspots are popping up away from coastal areas, including, surprise surprise, places like Kentucky (a 650% spike) that had followed Captain COVID's advice on relaxing social distancing and reopening businesses. The heartland, the Midwest, had for all these months enjoyed a relative respite from the outbreak. But now the chickens have come home to roost on the farm.

   But, lest the American public fear the "president" is working too hard on this coronavirus "response", he also made time to scream about Barack Obama and the most despicable scandal in American history, the #Obamagate that's bigger than Watergate. Because Obama... did something, although Trump wouldn't say what. 

    During a typical weekend of rage-tweeting during his withdrawal from not being able to play golf at one of his branded courses, Trump was screaming about Obama doing something despicable and curated the hashtag #Obamagate, which was jumped on by thousands on Crimson Twitter but no one could explain what the big fuss was about. I guess just rage-tweeting the last real president's name was enough to activate his apocalyptic base.

    Jesus, no wonder Kevin Hsssett said, "it's scary going to work." 

   Perhaps the most outrageous statement of that outrageous Hindenburg-class presser was when Trump channeled Junior Bush in his May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" moment and said, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.” Although even the numbers that are dribbling out of the kinked hose at the White House are indicating that we have met the moment and that pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be the coronavirus freight train.

    Seriously, at the rate Trump is pushing back the goal posts, by this summer he's going to be saying, "If I'm the only American left standing, that'll be a great victory, right? Because it's really all about me." Because that's exactly, precisely to what and where his rhetoric is inexorably leading- As long as he survives, nothing else matters. Think I'm resorting to hyperbole?

     Look at the second image above, when Trump was "lava-level mad" after finding out that his valet had been diagnosed with coronavirus. Trump was furious with his staff that have been instructed not to wear masks or to observe social distancing guidelines for not doing enough to protect him. And if there was any shred of doubt left in your mind that Donald Trump is a self-absorbed sociopath, that should dispel it.